Horticultural Lighting Gets Big @LESA

LESA and Cornell have received a prestigious INFEWS award from the National Science Foundation for $2.4M to fund a program in advanced urban farming. This program focuses applied plant growth research on water use efficiency, transpiration and nutritional value optimization using engineered solutions for vertical farming.

The Center for Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications (LESA) has built a substantial profile in engineered lighting solutions for fundamental and applied research on lighting and plant growth. Its strong research team that includes renowned plant physiologist Dr. Tessa Pocock. The center’s capabilities, solutions, and potential for high-tech horticultural lighting and the science of lighting for plant growth optimization have positioned the center as one of the best and broadest resources for horticulture lighting research. This program focuses applied plant growth research on water use efficiency, transpiration and nutritional value optimization using engineered solutions for vertical farming.

As a result, LESA has been able to forge partnerships with agricultural research powerhouses such as Cornell University, which led to the creation of the Greenhouse Lighting and Systems Engineering Consortium in 2017 – or GLASE to focus on reducing the carbon footprint of modern greenhouse operations. Together LESA and Cornell have also received a prestigious INFEWS award from the National Science Foundation in 2017 for $2.4 million to fund a program in advanced urban farming. This program focuses applied plant growth research on water use efficiency, transpiration and nutritional value optimization using engineered solutions for vertical farming.

With Pocock’s contributions, LESA has been able to develop a profile of expertise spanning the entire technology supply chain in solid-state lighting (SSL) for horticultural lighting applications. From new approaches to increasing the energy efficiency of horticultural lighting fixtures, developing new optical sensors that permit plant growth optimization, and careful research on tradeoffs between dynamic spectral power distributions and plant health, growth rate and nutritional content, LESA is bringing a new level of engineering sophistication to horticultural lighting solutions.

This is in direct alignment with LESA’s long-term strategic vision for engineered lighting solutions and its plans to advance horticultural lighting technology as part of the center’s on-going research mission of creating “Lighting Systems that Think™.”